Marcel Volkerts

Marcel Volkerts is an associate director for Ecofys, a Navigant company, where he focuses on urban energy and smart cities.

Prior to joining Ecofys, Marcel worked as a principal consultant for DNV GL where he was a leading member of the Universal Smart Energy Framework design team and leader of a four-year multi-partner smart gas grids research project. He has headed up several smart city and resilience projects where (open) data is combined with state-of-the-art models and visualization techniques to develop decision support tools and serious games for complex multi-stakeholder transition processes. Through his work with best-selling author and economist Jeremy Rifkin, he contributes to road maps for the transition to smart sustainable cities and regions such as Hauts de France, the metropolitan region of Rotterdam-The Hague in the Netherlands and EU member state Luxembourg.

Before switching to the energy sector in 2011, Marcel enjoyed an international career in IT, working for various start-ups in both the Netherlands and the USA. As the director of quality assurance and manager of the database group of Florida-based internet security firm SafeCentral (formerly Authentium), he successfully established an international quality assurance and product development organisation, before stepping into a role as an internal consultant for the CTO and COO, advising on product development and competitive analyses.